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 Welcome to my first real Let’s Play! And it’s (mostly) blind, too! Well, I did play some of this game to get the basics and most of the game tends to play out the same, but there’s still some depth I missed by just skimming it like that. Let’s rectify that now! The Game Imperium is a simple little turn-based strategy game made by two guys for the Amiga and the Atari ST home computers. Published by Electronic Arts back when they’re still pretending not to be evil, it is indeed something. It’s nice for a couple turns if you have a working emulator, but it utterly lacks everything a fan of classic space 4X-action would expect. It comes with a lot of crashes, though. But I’m apparently a masochist so gently caress this, we’re still going through with this. Be warned though, a lost jewel of 1990 this ain’t. I’m not so sure about this We’re playing here through the Atari ST-version. And since I lack every possible tool to take screenshots on my old Atari ST (yes I own one and the original game, too), we’re playing on an Atari ST emulator instead. This also makes it possible for me to work around the many, many crashes the game goes through. There’s still time to turn back, you know No seriously, every time you accidentally move a window or close a window while music is playing, there’s a 90% chance the Atari ST will just give up and freeze. I was surprised and annoyed to find out the emulated game crashes the exact same way the original game on its floppy does in my real Atari ST. On the other hand, that’s some impressive emulation right there. Still, my PC has a real mouse instead of the weird giant trackball my Atari ST came with, so playing on PC it is. (You don’t want to know how awfully slow it is to control the cursor by rolling a huge bowling ball around.) This makes me feel ill, I don’t think we should Imperium is strange. It’s almost utterly grey, even though a few sparks of color here and there prove it’s just a design choice, not a limitation of the Atari itself. Both the Atari ST and the Amiga were well known for their high-quality sound chips, but if you click the link to the title screen and music, you’d never know this based on this game. But not only graphics and sound are bafflingly barebones, the gameplay has a lot of weird quirks we’re gonna have to live through somehow.  Thrilling! And about 95% of the game's graphics right here.  Accounting for the title screen and some random bits here and there, that's about 3% of the rest. Oh, I almost forgot: Enjoy the titlescreen and music. Coincidentally, it also accounts for about 95% of the game's sound. Ugh, you win just get on with this  Don't do this. My favourite little quirk is the option of changing turn lengths: Normal turn length is 1 year and you have 1000 turn/years to win the game. You can scale your turn length up to 10 years to shorten a game down to about 100 turns, though. The dirty secret here is: The player is the only one who can do this. If you do this, you’re loving yourself over by essentially giving the AI-empires 9 extra turns for every 1 turn you have. Good luck going far with this. Now, I’ll go into the details of the game later, for now I have this strange piece of paper. It’s heavily stained and was apparently send out by something called the Institute of Electoral Control. Message for the Emperor of Mankind So today is a great day. Your fierce political rival, Emperor Colinus, has died last year and today you have been elected Emperor in his stead. Who the hell are you again? Anyway, now you reign over Earth and it’s mighty empire. Everyone just calls it “the Empire” for some reason. Let’s see if you can find out on space wiki the real name real quick before your inauguration speech tomorrow. Also apparently there are four enemy empires threatening our borders, but someone dumped space wine over their names. Stupid election celebration. OK, this is a mess. Enemy fleets are slowly assembling to take us down and we don’t even know who we are. Looks like we need some serious help for this. Maybe basing the monarchy on drugs was a bad idea after all. At least you won the election, go celebrate a bit more. I’m sure the imperial bureaucracy can deal with your absence for a day more. 21st August, 2020; IEC signed by: Thompson Heartgrave Strange, isn’t it? If you think you guys can recover the missing information out of this drunk rambling, we’ll be off to a good start. Or at least a start. To give you a bit of time, I’ll post some more stuff about basic gameplay on Sunday and next week we’re hopefully having our new Emperor back from his/her hangover. A 1000-year-realm doesn’t build itself, you know! Edit: I totally forgot to mention empire-names can only have 11 letters and person-names only 9 letters, or they don't fit. Oops, my bad! Imperium A Must For Serious Game Players (Round 1) 01 Imperium: UI of Doom 02 Imperium: Story Intermission I 03 Imperium: A Great Start a Great Emperor 04 Imperium: To Order a Mobilization 05 Imperium: Colonization Blues 06 Imperium: Politics get Personal 07 Imperium: Black Friday in Space or The Economic Disaster Movie 08 Imperium: Story Intermission II 09 Imperium: The Legacy of Zarg 10 Imperium: The Chaos of Peace 11 Imperium: Oh Mein loving Gott 12 Imperium: Total War 13 Imperium: Lowtax Lost 14 Imperium: The Unquiet Interim of Waiting 15 Imperium: Endgame I 16 Imperium: Endgame II Run 1 Write Up What Went Wrong? Imperium II: The Aurora Empire Strikes Back (Round 2) 01 Imperium II: Prologue I 02 Imperium II: Prologue II 03 Imperium II: Set-Up 04 Imperium II: Reforms 05 Imperium II: Exploring the Known 06 Imperium II: Empire Building 07 Imperium II: Debt Rising 08 Imperium II: The Good, the Bad and the Really Ugly News. 09 Imperium II: Crisis in Infinite Lowtax 10 Imperium II: The Fight for Popularity 11 Imperium II: Let's Prepare a War 12 Imperium II: The Popularity of War 13 Imperium II: Colonization Frenzy 14 Imperium II: Memory Recovery 15 Imperium II: Not much Left Imperium: AI Wars 1st Century Libluini fucked around with this message at 13:23 on Aug 28, 2016 |
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Aug 21, 2015 21:07
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Who the hell are you again? We are Emperor Lord Divine God-Emperor The Mighty XVI on space wiki the real name real quick And we rule over The People's Imperial Confederation of Sovereign Free States three enemy empires threatening our borders Our deadly arch-rivals: The Glorious Collective of the Jackbooted Fist The Most Loving and Peaceful Alliance of Wardroids The United Colonies I look forward to experiencing this crash-riddled grey horror!
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Aug 21, 2015 21:22
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How come I've never heard of this game? It doesn't look like a 4X game. The style is reminiscent of Balance of Power, but I don't think it works like that either. More info is clearly needed.
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Aug 21, 2015 21:58
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Hob_Gadling posted:How come I've never heard of this game? It doesn't look like a 4X game. The style is reminiscent of Balance of Power, but I don't think it works like that either. More info is clearly needed. More info comes on Sunday. It's a 4X though, don't worry. The UI is just incredibly unfriendly to the naked eye. The map is hidden inside a submenu, for example. More on that next post. For some dumb reason I had this first post ready just before I have to spend an entire day with relatives. Bad timing, I guess!  Also for some reason I forgot to mention empire-names can only have 11 letters and person-names only 9 letters, or they don't fit. I added this important point to the OP. Now back to naming things! Edit: And I forgot we have four enemy empires in the game. Not three. Corrected. Wow, this is off to a good start already. 
Libluini fucked around with this message at 22:17 on Aug 21, 2015 |
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Aug 21, 2015 22:03
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4X more like X11.
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Aug 21, 2015 22:55
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I think I once ran into this game while sorting through an old ST games collection, but I gave up before rally getting started. Looking forward to this. Those name restrictions are annoying. Our Empire is called Emperor and our Emperor is called Empire. Enemies are: Sentient M. (Milieu) NAoFS Hierarchy
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Aug 22, 2015 00:04
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Our emperor is Bernie and our empire is Sanderistia. Our pitiful enemies are: Shillarya Trumpistan GOP and W.A.L.L.S.T.R.E.E.T (without the periods)
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Aug 22, 2015 00:14
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Actually we're weedgoku
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Aug 22, 2015 01:59
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Pretty sure we're Weedlord and our empire is Bonerhitler
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Aug 22, 2015 03:41
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We are Chief Gune of the Aurora empire. Because that UI looks just about as unfriendly.
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Aug 22, 2015 06:56
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We are For the Emperor, of the Neo-Terran Imperium! Praise the Emperor is also acceptable.
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Aug 22, 2015 12:19
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So, I've been compiling tomorrows post and gently caress it, I'm only halfway through explaining the UI and I already found two more ways for players to accidentally commit suicide. Fake Edit: Also holy gently caress, how do you LP-masterminds do this poo poo without going insane? I've typed up 7 pages (12 with screenshots) for half a post! My fingers are bleeding and tomorrow I have to write almost as much to get this done on time! I wish someone would pay me for all this work.  On the other hand, wow you guys will have fun with this "game". Real Edit: Nick Wilson, one of the two devs Imperium had posted:Very few strategy games have user-friendly 'user-interfaces' and we believe that Imperium sets new standards for ease of use and attractiveness of the user-interface. That combined with the depth of the game design and addicteveness of the game makes Imperium a must for any serious game player. Either Electronic Art's marketing bozos attributed this "speech" to Nick Wilson without his consent, or he was high as a kite back in 1990 when he said this. Imperium is a must for any serious game player. 
Libluini fucked around with this message at 23:15 on Aug 22, 2015 |
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Aug 22, 2015 23:08
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No, you see, gray is totally in this year.
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Aug 23, 2015 07:10
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quote:Either Electronic Art's marketing bozos What marketing? Electronic Arts had no power back then.
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Aug 23, 2015 07:20
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Bloodly posted:What marketing? Electronic Arts had no power back then. EA was already eight years old in 1990, so I just assumed they had a working marketing department, like every other normal company.  I'm still thinking drugs, though. Especially since both programmers were students at the time they were working on Imperium.
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Aug 23, 2015 12:22
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Nice to see some suggestions for names already, just remember: 9 letters for our emperor’s name 11 letters for our empire and every enemy empire (we have four enemies, by the way) We can also rename every planet and solar system, with the same dumb letter restrictions. Our emperor also has some subordinates, which can be renamed, too. Something I forgot last time: If someone wants to enter the game Tron-style, I’ll take one random subordinate and rename him to you. But that subordinate maybe meeting some horrid fate later, so think about it twice before throwing your name into the ring. Hopefully we’ll have enough goons for goons, or there may be a waiting list at some point. Now while we’re waiting on more name suggestions and crazy people trying to get warped into the world of Imperium, my very own subordinate, Dr. Krankenstein, will teach you some things about the UI. Have fun! Imperium: The UI of Doom  : Welcome, goons of Something Awful! Today I, Dr. Krankenstein, will tell you some important information about imperial control. You will be using something called the “UI”, which stands for Universal Interface, to take control of your empire. With this marvelous system, developed by the ultronic scientists Matthew Stibbe and Nick Wilson in 1990, you will have perfect control over every single citizen of the empire. At least this is what their company’s marketing department claimed. Let’s see how close those claims come to reality, together! : The UI organizes everything you need to now from left to right. Just use your mouse or oversized trackball to aim and click at the symbol you want and you get the window you maybe wanted! It’s as easy as that.: In this case, the first “I” on the left opens imperial configuration windows. Yes, windows. The configuration window above only appears once, at the start of the game. As soon as you close the window, you better hope everything is like you wanted, or you can restart the game and try again! Every other time, another window will appear at this point. : Case in point: Now that the empire has been “configured” for the first time, the same icon opens up the game-configuration instead. In this window, you can save, load, quit or get useless information about the game you can also read in the manual. There you also get more than the usual “This game was made by”-trite. Oh, and you also can rename everything. Every planet or system, every empire (including your own) and every subordinate (which includes the emperor, I kid you not).: The only drawback: The initial power of Earth’s enemies will be forever set in stone without a complete restart. As a strange restriction, you only get 9 letters for people-names and 11 letters for everything else. According to the manual, the two Brits working on this game were apparently working on the ZX80 before they started working on Imperium for Electronic Arts. Which may be the explanation why this game has so many restrictions you wouldn’t expect on an Atari ST or Amiga. The programmers were simply to inexperienced to really use the better hardware of those machines.  : As a test of the UI, let’s rename Earth to “USA”. Since Lowtax is a citizen of the USA, it’s logical to assume he would rename our home world if he ever gets elected emperor of mankind. : His empire is of course, Something Awful. Or Something A, since the UI isn’t perfect. : Also listed here are the four enemy empires. We will meet them or some other, strangely similar empires with different names, at some point in the near future.Please find better names then the programmers did. Please.  : For now, let’s rename one of them to Lowtax’ one major enemy: The dreaded Reddit Empire. : We could also rename our emperor here. The UI calls him subordinate since according to it’s arcane programming, the emperor is subordinate to the empire he/she leads. Please disregard this quirk. : Now we’re done with naming shenanigans and go on to the second icon of our UI. The GAME CONTROL PANEL, not to be confused with the GAME panel we just left, allows some more options. None of them are useful for us, so let’s skip this panel for now.We can switch off the game sound, which is a rather nonsensical option, considering the game consists of 99% dead silence and we can decide to let the AI control up to all of the three major aspects of the game. I didn’t try to see what happens if I exclude myself from the game by switching on all three AIs, but I assume it isn’t pretty. Experiments may happen after we won, though.  : The next icon controls Alliance Construction. Here we can make defensive, offensive and simple information alliances with our enemies. All those alliances will be temporary, of course. There’s only one true empire, after all.  : Right next to the Alliance-icon we have the Embargo-panel. Trade embargos are a fun way to pass the time, at least this is what my economics professor always said.  : The taxation module is symbolized by a borderpost in the order line and this makes sense in a way, since “taxation” here really means custom duties. And you read that right, we can give negative tariffs to essentially give away money. Personally, this seems kind of weird for me, but at least you can’t say the makers of the UI weren’t trying to include every possibility.According to the manual, negative tariffs are a good way to force a certain behavior when planets decide which planet to buy goods from. Import taxes are levied against your own planets when their dumb little AIs decide to buy from alien planets and export taxes are levied against alien planets when you sell them goods. High tariffs therefore restrict trade with dirty aliens, while low or negative tariffs stimulate trading. However, don’t forget negative export taxes mean we’re essentially paying our enemies for trading with us. Generally they don’t need the extra help.  : The treasury menu is a bit more complicated. You can transfer money around, look at historical data, look at production, supply and subsidies. The last one is, like transferring wealth, a tool to move imperial assets and money to where they are most needed. The last item lets you look at the imperial trade volume.  : Production is the most important, since it allows you to determine what your empire should produce. Consumer items make people happy and allow more trade, ship building needs the other three. Generally it’s a good idea to set sliders to a negative balance if you overproduce something and to a positive balance if you’re in dire need of computers for your space warships. According to the manual, military goods include planetary defenses and industrial goods include infrastructure, while technological goods are necessary for communications. So take that in mind. Luckily there’s another method of creating infrastructure and defenses on a planet, in case we gently caress up production too badly. It’s called IMPERIAL SUBSIDY and part of the same menu. You can spend money on specific planets to develop their infrastructure or technology. This is the only way to raise technology levels. Developing infrastructure will raise both it and planetary defenses. Then you’ll just have to make sure your dumb planet doesn’t trade it away again!  : Trade volume simply lists our imports and exports, together with the empire we’re trading with. Right now that list is completely empty, since we haven’t had any trade yet. : The little graph icon next to the weird looking coin is the politics menu. Here we can see when the next election will be, how much money we have allocated to our campaign and how popular Lowtax is. We can call an election whenever we want, though!It’s another secret way to game over town, too! Just call for an election when everyone hates your guts, and you immediately lose! Right now the popularity-number is just a placeholder. In my experience during test games, the real number after the game starts is much higher. I had 74% after a couple of turns doing nothing, so staying elected isn’t that hard at least.  : Population control is the emperor using his mind control powers to force people to use more or less condoms, which in turn affects population growth.As soon as the population hits a certain value, planets start to suffer. Stalinistic purges to force a -10% growth won’t happen though. Remember, we’re a space monarchy! This means planets will do the feudal thing where they’re start ignoring your orders if they’re too stupid. This means sooner or later good planets will be overcrowded. Happy fun times!  : The subordinate display, accessed by clicking on the weird faceless man right in the middle of our line of orders, is quite frankly one of the most important panels in the Universal Interface. Here we can take a look at our emperor and every single one of his subordinates. Huh? Emperor Lowtax is apparently quite dull. Well, it sounds plausible, I guess. : Emperor Lowtax has many minions. One of them is Lewis, Ambassador of Something A. He resides inside the dreaded empire of Reddit and will give us warning in case Reddit does something evil. Hopefully his incompetence won’t mean the warning comes too late. More important: Promotions, drug allocations and other stuff are all done here. Don’t forget to allocate drugs to the emperor, or his reign may end faster then you thought!Hint: Enemy empires have no fucks to give and aren’t above sending invasion fleets on turn 1. An ambassador –and you have one automatically for each enemy empire, will warn you if that happens. Also the last bit from the good doctor is no joke: Another secret way to kill yourself is forgetting to give your emperor drugs.  : The thing which looks like military rank insignia opens up a menu full of military options. The first option simply allows the mighty emperor to select which planets ships should be built on.  : The next option opens the SPACESHIP CREATION panel. Here you can custom-design new ship classes using sliders. Higher numbers mean better. Simple as that. You can only create up to 20 classes. After that, every new class means deletion of an older one. : All sliders are interconnected, by the way. This means specialization is god, since generalized jack-of-all-trade ships will always be worse at everything than a specialist ship. : Take this example: All sliders are at maximum position, but fire power and armor took a nosedive simply by maxing out engines. In case you’re wondering, gross weight is calculated in abstract “units”. One unit is 100t weight. So our new 100 unit scout weighs 10.000t. The cost is also in units, but here one unit is 100.000 Imperial Zongs. If we want to build larger ships, we need to choose a planet with higher technology level. Right now, there isn’t one. : The third option is CREATE FLEET and not only allows the creation of fleets, it allows to look through subordinates to search for a good commander.  : Emperor Lowtax is competent, let’s try him! : Oops! Looks like Imperial Security Services don’t want the emperor to go off and lead fleets far away from Earth. Sadly you can never change your emperor once he sits down on his throne on Earth. : So let’s take Pentheus instead. Pentheus has no titles, no promotions and doesn’t get paid. He also doesn’t get any drugs, since Lowtax apparently wants him dead. He’s also incompetent, but politically reliable. So he gets Lowtax’ first interstellar command.”Nostrum” is the drug I’ve been talking about all the time. It’s a life-prolonging drug you utterly need for your emperor to survive to the end of the game. If you can’t find the stuff fast enough (Our home system doesn’t have any, we need to explore to find Nostrum.), it means instant game over when old age strikes you down. Also you can be nice and feed Nostrum to your favourite minions to take them with you into eternity.  : Now our new fleet is ready! It has a name, a leader and a planet where the fleet will be stationed. The UI still demands a click on “OK” to really create the fleet, of course. : CREATE TROOPS is an option which won’t be relevant for quite some time, so let’s skip that and go straight to building our new ships with the BUILD SHIPS-panel. The mighty 10Bux-class of imperial warships I’ve designed off-screen costs 221,9 million Imperial Zongs and weighs 5.000 tons. They are slow, have the space equivalent of potato-guns for weapons are armored with the best tinfoil Earth can produce. I’m sure they’ll sow fear into the hearts of our enemies! We will build three of them, which coincidentally depletes our entire funds for this year. : As soon as a ship building order has been created, the next option starts making sense: Under SHIPBUILDING STATUS you can check your building orders. Right now it tells us the shipyards of USA are buying the materials they need to build. All materials have to be produced or traded to the planet for building to start. If the imperial treasury doesn’t have enough money, you can here allocate some extra money. The build time is 1 year, so next turn our order should be finished! As a little side note: You can only have one build order active at the same time. And every build order can only build one class of ships at a time. So if Lowtax wants some scouts and some fierce heavy warships, he’ll have to wait until one or the other is finished before starting to build the rest. (Also he needs to wait until his technology level is high enough to build more than scouts, of course.)The game mercifully deals with trade and buying materials all by itself. For some strange reason you have to allocate build costs manually, though. One neat thing: If your empire doesn’t produce enough commodities to build you ships, it will automatically attempt to buy from alien empires. Yes, this means a dumb AI could give us the parts we need to finish our Dreadnoughts. Let’s see if that actually happens or if the AI is smart enough to place enemies under trade embargoes.  : The second-to-last order of the day in the military menu is the mighty FLEET REPORT. The Fleet Report panel shows the imperial fleets we have created. Here for example is Pentheus’ 1st Fleet, consisting of zero ships and no troops at the moment. Let’s try to give Pentheus the two scouts orbiting USA at the moment! : The UI gets a bit unintuitive here, but don’t worry, it’s really simple: Just click on POOL TO FLEET, mark the ships you want to move, then go to the other window and click on OK.  : You will get no feedback, except for some numbers in the fleet window rising, so make sure you actually moved your ships! Moving ships back into the pool of available ships works the same, just with the FLEET TO POOL icon instead. : And now we’re finally on the last item of the military menu: The FLEET ORDERS! This panel allows you to allocate up five different orders to a fleet. INVADE and MOVE TO need a planet as destination, but holding is just hanging around, you don’t need a destination for that. If you want a fleet to hold somewhere else, you’ll need to move them over there first. Logical! : A little test for Pentheus: Lowtax orders him to wait for a year, so his ship crews can get some much needed training, then he is supposed to move his scouts to the planet Phoson. We don’t know where that planet actually is, since Lowtax just chose it at random from the dropdown-list you get by clicking on PLANETS. : Now that military matters have been attended to, we can move on. The next icon, which looks like some sort of cross, is actually the option to create and move ark ships. Ark ships are used to colonize new worlds or to transport population and commodities around your empire. Passenger ships don’t exist, so obviously you can’t just move people without an ark ship!  : To make this work, simply chose a destination and a source planet, move the sliders to determine how much goods and people should be moved and if you can pay the cost, click on OK. Be aware though, only five ark ships are allowed to be in space at the same time. Regulations, you understand? Checking that box over there allows you to move your homeplanet. In this case, the entire Imperial Palace will be grabbed by giant claws, moved into the main hangar of the ark ship and then transported to the new imperial capital.: Lowtax likes to boss people around, so he’ll order an empty ark ship to move no one and nothing from USA to Saturn. This will cost nothing, since the imperial bureaucrats are smart enough to forge some documents instead of actually moving a huge ark ship for nothing. When the non-existent ark ship arrives at Saturn next year, some clerk will send Lowtax a nice message proudly claiming 0 people and 0 tons of commodities have been transported to Saturn. : Onwards! The antenna-symbol opens up the CREATE ANTENNA panel. Here we can set up interstellar antennas to give our empire perfect reports on every planet in every system falling into the antenna’s reach. The higher the technology level of a planet is, the higher the range is. Right now our technology-level is too low to build one, but for later this is a nice option for some easy spying. : Now comes the most important part of the UI: Empire Reports. Oh, excuse me, EMPIRE REPORTS. The two buttons here allow you to see a fast overview of any empire in the game, and what kind of relationship it has with every other empire. As another interesting quirk of the game, it’s impossible to see your relationship with another empire if you start with your own first. The game stores only the alien empire’s relationship TO YOU, but not your relationship TO THEM. Hey, the programmers thought this makes sense, OK?  : For comparison’s sake, here the Reddit Empire. It’s capital is the planet Naygon, it has about the same money we have, but only roughly a third of the population. This is with leaving all sliders from the start of the game at middle position. Based on that and on that sudden invasion in one of my test games, I extrapolated enemy empires start with roughly the same strength as us at normal settings, minus the weirdly low population. Ah, I almost forgot: The “units” for population translate to one unit for 100.000 people. 5.643 units of population means 564,3 million people. That’s not too bad, though: Remember, after a certain sweet spot additional population starts being a hindrance, so having less people actually helps the AI!  : We can go into greater detail with the PLANETARY REPORTS. It tells us a lot of stuff and we actually get a small graphic detailing the planet we look at! We can also look at alien planets, but the farther away those are, the more distorted and wrong the info is. That’s where our Antennas come into play. An information alliance with an enemy empire also neutralizes distortion –but also for our “allies”. In this case we get the name, empire and leader of the planet, which solar system it is part of, the star type and some other science information, then a lot of data about the economic and military situation on the ground.: Right now we have 423,3 million people living on planet USA and our planetary treasury holds 1,221 billion Imperial Zongs. Lowtax didn’t think we’d need an army, so our garrison is zero. All our ships are assigned to a fleet, so the ship pool size is zero, and our defences are 7. Which is probably the Imperial Palace alone and that’s it. Stability, Integrity and Loyalty are all important to hold control and have a stable production capability. Technology level is important for ship building and space antennas, while material structures refers to infrastructure like railways, education networks and hospitals. It can be traded away. Moral Infrastructure is an imaginary value assigned by imperial psychologists: It determines attitude and moral strength. I imagine higher means better, but imperial psychologists are a weird bunch and I wouldn’t put it past them to make it the other way around.: Our yearly Nostrum growth is zero, since we don’t even have any and distortion for looking at our homeworld is thankfully zero. Next!The values for Stability, Integrity and Loyalty work all slightly different: Stability has to be lower to be better, while Integrity has to be higher, for example. Integrity is affected by everything you do. If the empire for example decides to decolonize a planet, the leader of the home planet suffers a hit in integrity for that action. Loyalty is straight up the level of loyalty the planet has to our empire. I assume higher is better, but the manual doesn’t actually say it. It also doesn’t say much about how you can affect stability and integrity besides that one example above. I guess we’ll have some fun finding out for ourselves? Huh.  : This is the Nostrum Report. The UI integrates this fine recreational drug even though we don’t actually have discovered it yet. This is some remarkable feat of technology.When we start the game properly, we better find some of this stuff pretty drat fast, or our emperor and his/her minions will start dropping like flies.  : The next panel opens up an overview of your popularity over the last ten years. Right now it’s the first year of Emperor Lowtax’ reign, so there’s no data here. From the next year on this list will slowly start to fill up. Imperial Data Protection Laws force the UI to purge data older then 10 years, though. It’s a shame, really. : This is the clipboard. Whenever another menu wants to send something to the clipboard, this is where said item will wind up. The menu is pretty simple: Report lets you take a look at whatever is in there, Orders allows you to give orders to fleets. Delete and Delete All are self-explanatory.The clipboard is another method of ordering fleets around. You can send planets from your map to the clipboard and then use the clipboard to send a fleet to said planet. It’s a neat little option if you don’t want to memorize planet names, which is what you need to do to properly use the dropdown-list in the fleet order menu itself. That said, this also means you can’t directly give fleet orders from the map.  : The NEWS REPORT panel supplies every emperor with the important information he or she needs to rule. Everything news worthy ends up in a handy list for you to read through.If you hear lovely music while reading your news item, you’ll be forced to hear it to the end. The game crashes if you try to close the window before the music is finished. Luckily the music is only like 5-10 seconds long.  : Since you’re the emperor, you have full power to just shoot every messenger you want. Every possible event can be flagged for you to either get a message whenever you feel like reading it, to get disturbed even while bathing or sleeping, or to ignore it altogether. This isn’t a joke! Don’t play around with the report options! The game gives no fucks and if you switch off important messages you’ll stop getting feedback about what happens. The game will happily ignore even the invasion of our home world if we tell it to. In game mechanic terms, a event type with the FLAG box checked will let the game continue until the turn is properly over and you can read about it afterwards. A event type with the STOP box checked will generate a message and stop the game when the event happens, so you can react immediately. I haven’t tested what happens if you check both, but I HAVE checked what happens when you check neither: You get told nothing until the zero feedback steers you into a game over.  : And this is the time regulation system. If combined with a proper news management, leading an empire turns from a chore to a nice holiday.This is of course because with the right news management, you can have ten years pass by per turn without you ever getting a chance to give input, while the AI-empires happily give input whenever something happens. In a test game I did exactly that and the game ended after 3 “turns”. At the same time, the AI had 30+ turns to gently caress my poo poo up. Giving longer turns for shorter games looks like a neat idea, but since the AI never obeys your asinine demands, it’s more like a secret hardcore mode for the mentally insane.  : Finally, the star map! The most important element of the UI by far is the last icon on the main menu, hugging the right corner of it. The two left arrow-buttons move the star map around so you can easier pick out single solar systems. : As soon as you pick out a solar system to look at, like Lowtax’ system of Phresys here, the two arrow-buttons can move the planetary system around the same way.  : So if a planet gets obscured, just move the map around a bit. The blue jewel over there is planet USA, by the way. If you want to send a fleet somewhere, just pick a planet, send it to the clipboard and then go to the clipboard to connect the item with the fleet order menu in order to give one of your fleets the order to move to or to invade said planet.As with a lot of other stuff I’ve just skimmed, we’ll go into deeper detail when we actually have to use the map during the game.  : And now Emperor Lowtax has got his first messages! Let’s take a look, shall we? : The 2020 message we’ve already read, but the 2021 messages are all new. The two ambassadors are just reporting the empires they’re dealing with are aggressive. That’s not really insightful, but the ambassadors aren’t getting paid yet, so probably they’re just phoning it in.The “THIS EMPIRE IS AGGRESSIVE”-message is part of a two-step warning before an immediate invasion. Sooner or later the same empires will send out an invasion fleet, which we will be warned off by another message by our dutiful (but poor) ambassador. That’s it then and without a working space antenna or fleets passing by we won’t get another warning before the fleet drops in on us.  : The last message Emperor Lowtax receives before I end this tutorial is a fake message from Saturn: It claims an empty ark ship arrived, transporting nothing from USA to Saturn. We know of course this never happened, it’s just a clever bureaucratic trick to minimize costs caused by idiot emperors.And that’s it for now. Tutorial is over. You know now everything you need to know before we start the game properly next week. I still need some good names, though. You can suggest: -A name for our emperor, 9 letters long. -A name for our empire, 11 letters long. -4 enemy empires, every name 11 letters long. -If you want to, you can take a look at the weird ship sliders shown above and try to make up a ship class. If it isn’t anything to stupid or crazy, I’ll take your suggestion. You can even name it if you want! -Volunteers can join the empire directly as a minion of our emperor! First come first serve. -If you don't want our home planet to be Earth and our home system to be [b]Phresys[b], new names please! By the way, you may have wondered why I have so many screenshots with windows obscuring other windows even though there is still a lot of space to move things around. The reason for this is simple: Every time I tried moving a window, the game crashed. Just so you know.
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Aug 23, 2015 20:20
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Just to recap: While explaining the game's UI, I found the following ways a player can commit suicide on accident: Let's loving DIE posted:-When configuring the enemy empires, you can easily make them strong enough you'll be hosed, because every empire can randomly be "aggressive" at the game's start and start sending invasion fleets at turn 1. Let's try to avoid these traps.
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Aug 23, 2015 22:47
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Can we name one of the other empires DarkSyde, with an emperor of DSP?Libluini posted:-Volunteers can join the empire directly as a minion of our emperor! Sign me up, Emperor!
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Aug 24, 2015 14:21
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Hyperman1992 posted:Can we name one of the other empires DarkSyde, with an emperor of DSP? Sadly we can only give names to other empires, not their emperors. I guess we give codenames or some dumb poo poo to alien empires, but they still use their own names in their own weird, incomprehensible language. Or the programmers were lazy, take your pick. But hey, if one of you guys end up rebelling after joining up, this will create a new empire and I guess we then "named" that emperor in a way. I don't know, we'll see when we ever get there. But your suggestion has beend added to the (rather small) pile of naming suggestions! Also welcome on board, Tron-style: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyV2gdvKm60 Hyperman1992 has joined the empire! Since you're the first, I probably won't forget to give you a salary. Probably. There are dozens of them, so I think of something like 200-300 thousand Imperial Zongs for the beginning. We have to get richer first before I can give out money (and drugs) like candy! FAKE EDIT: On Wednesday I'll make an intermediary judgement on all naming suggestions and on Friday is the final day I'll accept new names. Following that, the first game post will go up around Sunday/Monday latest.
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Aug 24, 2015 17:48
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Anticheese posted:We are Chief Gune of the Aurora empire. I can support this one, Aurora was the first thing to pop to mind when I saw that UI. Anyway, I'll throw my hat into the ring of prospective mauve shirts.
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Aug 24, 2015 18:12
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Hey, boss, I'm ready to give my life for this empire, which is why I'm applying for a cushy bureaucratic job. Anyway, I have some intel on one of the up-and-coming empires out there: The Militaire Sans Empereur, or MSE for short. Got some crazy poo poo going on there, believe you me.
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Aug 24, 2015 23:33
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OK, today is Wednesday, so I'm taking a look at what we have so far. Remember, Friday is the last day I'm accepting new names, since I want to start playing and making screenshots on Saturday! The_White_Crane suggested: The Mighty XVI too long, but could fit as MightyXVI The People's Imperial Confederation of Sovereign Free States only fits as acronym: PICSFS The Glorious Collective of the Jackbooted Fist GCJF The Most Loving and Peaceful Alliance of Wardroids MLPAW The United Colonies UC OK, a little bit too many acronyms and one empire has been left out, but that's partially my fault for being dumb. tonberrytoby suggested: Empire (name of the Emperor) Emperor (name of the Empire) Sentient M. NAoFS Hierarchy So a dumb joke name combined with serious SF-names. That's kind of a bad combination. HerraS suggested: Bernie Sanderistia Shillarya Trumpistan GOP WALLSTREET Everything fits and it's actually kind of funny. If we don't have enough good suggestions I'm plundering here, probably. Gamerofthegame suggested: Weedgoku Flyingporcupine suggested: Weedlord Bonerhitler OK your suggestions are so bad I adjust your votes by -50, just in case someone else votes for this poo poo ComissarMega suggested: For or Praise as emperor-name NTI is our empire Eh, it works. Hyperman1992 suggested: DarkSyde (enemy empire) Hyperman1992 joined (our still nameless) empire as a subordinate of the emperor. Starting salary: 200.000 Imperial Zongs! Anticheese suggested: Chief Gune for Emperor! Aurora is our empire! I have no idea who Chief Gune is, but I know Aurora. It caused me really painful headaches.  Cimbri suggested: Nothing, but he voted for Chief Gune and Aurora. He also wants to join the Aurora-empire. Pyroi suggested: The Militaire Sans Empereur (enemy empire) He also wants to join, preferably with a cushy desk job. Welp, there are some of those, all right. Summary: Most suggestions only got 1 vote, two got -50 votes and one suggestion got actually voted twice. Welp, until someone comes up with better suggestions, that's it. My own personal suggestion would be going with Emperor Lowtax and SA (for Something Awful, which is too long.) Enemy empires would be Reddit, Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook. Let's see how it looks on Friday, when I close down the voting booth. Remember, you can suggest all of these things: Suggestions! posted:-A name for our emperor, 9 letters long. And now time for recruitment! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyV2gdvKm60 Cimbri has joined the empire! Pyroi has joined the empire! Imperial Roster posted:Hyperman1992 (renamed HypermanX to fit)
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Aug 26, 2015 14:38
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So, it's Saturday and I officially close the before-the-game-voting booth. Let's have a look at our final world building: quote:The Story So Far OK, well this could probably have gone better. Just you wait, guys! I'll prepare the first post while Emperor Chief Gune's deathsquads "silence" the rioters.
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Aug 29, 2015 12:16
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Governor's Log, Spacedate: Tuesday. Now that I have finally become the Governor of Saturn, I am going to start instituting a few changes. For one, I have banned the color green, and ordered my science team to start working on a way to bioengineer plants to be red. That should take them a while. In other news, I have converted my police force into a team of armored enforcers, that I have codenamed: "Stormy Troop Men". They will exert my will to all of Saturn, and my people will soon learn to fear me. That's what they get for not giving me a discount on Space Amazon.
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Aug 30, 2015 00:01
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Year 2020: A Great Start a Great Emperor First things first! I adjust my mouse speed down so my Atari ST-emulator doesn't let me overshoot everything (the feedback feels a bit weird at the speed I'm normally using), followed by awkwardly typing our emperor and our empire into the small text windows. I also configure our alien empires to be a bit more wealthier, but move the army size a bit down at the same time. This should make them equally strong to a normal start, but buy us some turns until they've built up their forces again. Technology and empire size I leave at the normal positions, since in my test games the enemy empires generally seemed to be quite small, so I don't want to gimp the AI here. It turns out later half my assumptions here may be wrong. Fancy that. I also probably hosed us over by giving the dirty aliens more money.  Here is our brave Emperor ChiefGune (gently caress those stupid restrictions). As the emperor, he is automatically and forever leader of Earth. Luckily he is very loyal to the empire and has acceptable competence. Though I have no idea how someone with "Dull" charisma got elected emperor of the entire solar system. ChiefGune is also rather young with an age of just 25 years. On the other hand, until we find some Nostrum (the game's live-prolonging drug) we're on a death timer counting down each year, so I'm quite happy with his apparent youth. Don't worry about the guys on the right, we will learn about each of them in due time. In case you're wondering, the 5 units of money per year I've given the emperor is according to the manual a sizable amount of Imperial Zongs. Half a million Zongs, in fact. By looking at our tax base and population, I determined one Imperial Zong must be like something inbetween 50 - 100 Dollar. That's at least 25 million Dollars a year for our emperor. I get the feeling I have to make sure all those other guys listed on the right get money, too. The manual claims stuff like loyalty takes a nosedive if I don't raise our subordinates correctly. They want and need money, drugs and promotions. It's like playing pokémon with weird Roman cosplayers replacing the little monsters.  This is Pyroi. He is a goon on Something Awful and now also a goon of Emperor ChiefGune. He wanted a cushy desk job.  And he got it! He is now the planet leader of Saturn. His yearly imperial salary is a nice 200k Zongs. For now. Saturn sounded far away and boring, but it turned out Saturn is actually our second most important colony right now! Sorry, Pyroi! Your desk job might be less cushy and boring then you hoped!  Cimbri, another goon who joined up with the Aurora Empire, is in serious danger of becoming a traitor. He is quite capable, though. So I decided to turn lemons into lemonade and send him off in command of Recon 01, our first exploration fleet. He now commands one of our two 10.000t scout ships. Far away from Earth and the imperial throne. Just in case I also allocate him some money to keep him happy. Later I forgot to give everyone except our goons and the emperor a salary. gently caress.  Hyperman1992 was the third and last goon to join us. Sadly, his name doesn't actually fit into the game, so the machine transporting him into the Aurora Empire accidentally changed his name to HypermanX. Sorry! Anyway, he is now the leader of our Home Fleet. Protecting Earth with 0 ships. Hope he succeeds!  This isn't a peaceful game and it's full of alien enemies. This is the first out of four of them. The evil GOP reside in the WALLSTREET-system. Planet Phrirg is their capital and Partyleader Smecus is their strange alien equivalent to our emperor. Thanks to them being far away, the distortion on our report is 100%. This means every number not zero on this sheet is completely wrong. What we're seeing here is a random number out of a range of 1 to twice the true number of the corresponding data. This is quite disturbing, considering this means the GOP could very well be twice as strong as seen here. If you see the numbers for our planets later, you may quietly despair.  By the way, decolonizing planets not in your empire is not possible, just in case you hoped we could end the game with a cheap win right here.  The DarkSyde Empire from the Phil-system looks enormously wealthy and is also insanely strong, compared to our 2 ships and 0 troops right now. The realm of YouTuber Phroogon is strangely backwards in the technology-department, though. But remember: Every number we see is actually false and we don't know the true numbers yet. Let's just hope DarkSyde and the GOP don't have 50+ ships each like it very well could be, or we're already hosed.  By the way, every time I renamed one of our capital systems, I had to first look at the empire in the empire report window, roll my eyes at the fake number given, then memorize the planet name. Then I had to go to the planet report window, select the planet I had memorized and memorize the system name. Then I had to go back to the renaming menu and select the system I wanted to rename. This game is not for people with bad memory.  Anyway, this is Reddit. The Reddit Federation from the Tumbler-system is lead by Moderator Staster, who resides on the Federation capital of Phrurg. Again, everything not a number or a zero on this picture is a dirty, dirty lie.  And our last alien empire: The ominous Hierarchy. It's capital planet Naygon sits in the Militaire-system. It's leader is called Liulux. It is currently unknown if those weird aliens even use a title for their leaders, so we only have the name and that's it.  Now we know something about our future enemies and it's time to set up some things for the first turn. I set import tariffs for all empires to 0%, so if we need something and can't produce enough of it, our planets will try to buy it from other empires. Giving free money doesn't seem necessary so early in the game, so I won't go below 0% for now. Our enemies can get hosed, though. If they want to build more warships with our computers, they have to pay us 5% customs every time.  This is what our empire produces, by the way. Even knowing nothing about the game, the zero next to "Robots" immediately tells me there's a problem here. Looking up my manual, it seems we need at least a small amount of robotics to build starships. We produce no robots at all, so every time we build a ship, we need to buy robots from aliens. Which luckily is fully automatic, but embargos and customs can and will hurt us enormously until we fix this.  So let's fix this! I pull the technology-slider a little bit to the right, which makes our empire produce a little bit more technology-goods like robotics. And slightly less of everything else, but this is why I adjusted the sliders only a little bit: We don't need many robotics, just more than zero. No reason to make our people unhappy and our soldiers unarmed just for more robots.  OK, next item on the agenda: What are our planets like? In 2020, only 423,3 million people are left on Earth. The reason for this was a devastating war, fought until total destruction of all countries in 2018. The war lasted only 23 days and ended with the formation of ICARL. The Imperial Council of Ancient Roman LARPers founded the Aurora Empire in December 2018 and the survivors rebuilding the blasted Earth elected Emperor Colinus to be the first leader. 2019 Emperor Colinus died and ChiefGune got elected, but we already know this, let's move on. We have 1,2 billion Imperial Zongs in Earth's treasury and since every planet only needs money to satisfy it's own commodity-demands, we can freely "transfer" money out of our planets treasury into our imperial treasury. The manual claims everything above 5000 units is automatically transferred into the imperial treasury. But when I moved on to turn 2, this didn't happen. I don't know if the manual is plain wrong, or if the transfer happens not every year, so not every turn. Let's wait and see together! The rest is poo poo. Our pool is the only pool our empire has and the two 10k-ton ships in it are our only scouts. They were constructed in less then a year by a nuked planet, so they're not really reliable. I think one of them is just the repurposed ISS. We don't have an army and our defenses are some forgotten Russian missile silos. We only have those because they malfunctioned in WWIII and never delivered their payloads. For some reason not a single Chinese and US-nuke targeted them. Still, it's not much considering the four alien empires we know didn't went through a war killing nearly 7 billion people in about a year. As you know, all of our enemies have sizable fleets and loving huge armies, even if we account for our reports being 100% wrong. Most problematic is our technology-level. At this point I'm fervently hoping our enemies are all really low instead of stupidly high, because the tech level is hard to rise and influences a lot of important stuff. The range of our spy antennas, how much they cost, how much our ships cost, how large our ships can be and how long it takes to build them. The last two points are by far the most important, since right now we can only build ships up to 10k tons, the smallest class. Theoretically, Earth's technology level would allow us to build up to 50.000t in ships, but sadly the game only counts the average technology level. And the other planets in our empire all have stupidly low levels, dragging us deep down. Later on the last point will be the major game changer, since we can only make one build order at a time. Reducing build time will be super-important later, when we have ships needing 16+ years to finish.  Now let's finally go over the other planets of the Lowtax-system. Here is good old Mars. The mess on Earth during 2016-2019 made over 287 million people emigrate to Mars, but it seems they left their appliances at home. Mars is odd, since it has a lot of population, but barely anything else. Probably it would be wise to boost Mars' defenses and technology with an Imperial Subsidy, but of course I completely forgot to do it this year.  Venus is a lot poorer than Mars, is even more backwards and the infrastructure of the planet is rather bad. Still, 227,8 million people were stupid enough to settle here. No wonder the planet is in such a lovely state, building enough secure, domed cities to protect millions of people on Venus must have taken an enormous effort. There presumably was nothing left for silly things like research or comfort. Venus has higher defenses than Earth for some reason. I get the feeling we get some extra points for the extreme deadliness of Venus. Or maybe it's just harder than usual to hit our defense batteries through the Venusian atmosphere? Something like that, probably.  Jupiter doesn't suffer as badly in the technology-department than Mars and Venus. It's still utterly poo poo. Anyway, a respectable 349 million people live on the moons around Jupiter. Nothing else to say except as a barren planet with acidic atmosphere, it isn't a good planet. Venus and Mars can become jewels over time, Jupiter stays a low-production turd. So I'll probably only raise tech and defenses a little bit here and that's it. For my peace of mind, I assume "barren" and "acidic" somehow refer to the moons of Jupiter, too.   Saturn, governed by Pyroi, one of our SA-goons turned space pixels. Even though "Icy" and "Helium" doesn't sound like a nice place to live for humans, there are an incredibly 501,9 million people living on the moons of Saturn. I guess a lot of survivors of WWIII ended up here, far away from Earth and it's wars. Well, too bad now you're part of the Aurora Empire and it's wars instead. Saturn is wealthier than Venus, has the highest population of all our planets and the second-highest tech level. The defenses are also higher than on Earth, our capital. OK, Saturn still needs some help, but only because it lacks some of the infrastructure it needs. Triton needs space highways, goddamit!   After going through all of our planets, I spend some time setting up subsidies. Earth needs some infrastructure and defenses, so I give some low fraction of the 10k units we can spend and give the maximum of science spending to raise our tech level.  Of course the game immediately reminds me the maximum I can spend for research is 10 million Imperial Zongs. Well, gently caress. Tech levels only rise by 1/year and only if you give the maximum of 10 million Zongs (100 units) in tech subsidies. Apparently spending on military research in the Aurora Empire is capped at this low level because of the horrible war which scoured Earth. People irrationally fear military research spending so much they would riot if we go above this maximum. Luckily we're allowed to cheat our population by giving the maximum to every planet in the empire.  A couple seconds later, my stupid error is corrected. The duration of the subsidy is two years, since I want to observe what happens the first go around. Later I'll set up real, long-time subsidies for all our planets.  Now it's time for Cimbri to go out and explore!  A random Rome-cosplayer gets to command the other explorer. Not enough real goons for all our jobs! This is the reason why we absolutely have to protect our subordinates: Without them, we can't move ships or troops around since every movement needs a fleet and every fleet needs a commander from our pool of subordinates. I really hope we get some reinforcements later, or we'll run into some serious trouble in a couple hundred years...  Since we're planning on sending out our only two ships, it's time to design some stalwart defenders of Earth. My first class is basically some huge armored guns with some engines strapped to them. Our Lancers will be slow as gently caress, be protected by cheap tinfoil, but holy poo poo will our enemies feel it when we shoot them. Calling all our ships "scouts" because the table in the manual bases nomenclature on tonnage alone is kind of silly, so I hereby declare everything under 50 weight units (5000 tons) a "courier", and 50 - 75 units will be "light corvettes". Under this system I just pulled out of my rear end, our new Lancers will be "corvettes".  For later use I've designed the "Stormfront"-class of light corvettes. They're only 5k tons to the 10k tons of our Lancer-corvettes and most of that is engines. They're supposed to be light and fast transports. The idea behind them is either reinforcing some far away colony with too low population to properly raise an army, or to hit enemy colonies lacking proper defenses with a Blitzkrieg. The association fast troop transport - Blitzkrieg - Nazis is responsible for the name of this class. Just thought you'd like to know.  After designing our new classes, let's build them! Well, one of them. Remember: We can only build one class at a time in the entire empire. So we better plan ahead! Off-screen I took a fast look at our empires' finances and decided we could easily pay for three brand new Lancer-corvettes. Or four scouts or four Stormfront light corvettes. But we need heavily armed ships to defend ourselves first, so they get priority. Interestingly, the "SCOUT"-class we got at game start follows a similar design philosophy like my Stormfronts. The scouts have roughly the same offense and defense as my light corvettes, even though those are only half their weight, but this is because 75% of a scout is made out of engines. After spending some time with the formulas given in the manual, it turns out the scout class is slightly faster as my own light and fast ship. Welp, at least my Stormfronts are slightly cheaper. But I'll probably make a third design later to get a smaller, even faster scout.  This is what happens if you try to build a second order after making the first. You literally can't build more than one order of ships. So you started building 10 giant Dreadnoughts and it takes 120 years to finish the order? Well, gently caress you now you don't get to build any ships anymore until the game is over or your ships are finished in 120 turns. 10 is the maximum amount of ships you can build at the same time. I guess this is a fail safe the programmers made up in case someone accidentally wanted to build 99 ships at the same time. For example, 99 dreadnoughts would take more turns to build than the entire games lasts. 1188 years at roughly the minimum tech level you need to build them, if you want to know. Sadly the programmers hate fun, so we can't block ourselves out from building ships by ordering 99 dreadnoughts at turn 230.  Here we can find the report for our build order. The current status shows what the hell our shipyards are doing. Right now they first need to buy all that stuff you need to build ships. Since we only this year started raising our robot-production from zero, this means our imperial shipyards will buy a lot of stuff from other empires for this first build order. The remaining build time is a bit wonky, since it only counts pure building time. If the shipyards need more than one turn to raise the necessary money and materials, well gently caress you. The report won't tell you this and if you don't allocate money manually, the shipyards will simply sit around until the AI finally gets around to giving your treasury enough money to import those robots you need. Cost outstanding is the fixed buildcost you got shown in the build window. The deployment planet is kind of important, too. Your ships will be automatically delivered to wherever you wanted them deployed to, so you can save a lot of time by sending your new battleships directly to the front. loving up here means your new warships will end up many years travel time from where you need them. Case in point about the money: I just kind of shrugged here in the first turn and assumed my imperial treasury would deal with the money issue. This is because I misinterpreted the manual: You actually have to pay twice for your ships. The fixed cost is separate from the cost of the commodities your yards have to buy. Your planets and shipyards deal with the commodities automatically, but the fixed cost is something you have to allocate yourself, or the build order will simply wait turn after turn after turn patiently for you to pay.  Now that we started to build some ships for our empty Home Fleet, it's time to raise a garrison for our completely undefended home world. We can raise 1% of our population every year for new army units. The manual patiently explains that only a part of this 1% ends up being soldiers. So 100 million people would be 1000 population units and we can raise 10 units of those. Those 10 brand-new military units aren't 1 million soldiers, though. Annyoingly, the manual doesn't actually tell you how many soldiers a military unit has. It just says "less than the 100.000 a population unit has". This is crap, so I had pull another number out of my rear end to make this somewhat understandable: 100.000 people have to be drafted to create an armed force of 10.000 soldiers. The other 90.000 are support staff, office workers and whatever else. So from now on those vague, ambiguous units will be called divisions. Every division has 10k soldiers. In this particular case, I raise 20 armored divisions. Not bad for one year. Those 20 divisions cost me 6 million Zongs, needed a draft of 2 million imperial citizens and created an armed force of 200.000 soldiers. And I guess a lot of tanks, but those got all abstracted away. Right after I raised another 20 infantry divisions and since this almost used up my draft alotment for the year, I could only raise 2 divisions of elite drop commandos after that. Next year we'll have a standing army of 42 divisions.  OK, we dealt with a lot of poo poo on turn 1, so let's celebrate by looking at our inauguration again via the wonders of Important note: If you start a report, you often get a short, horrible sounding soundclip (I'll try to remember to make a recording of this awful, awful mess.) playing in the background. The programmers really want you to hear this, because the game immediately crashes if you try to close the window before the music ends.  Color! Yeah, it surprises me every time, too. This is the map. You can move it around like Dr. Krankenstein already told you. What he didn't tell you: Whatever is actively shown in the window is colored blue or blinks. In this case, just every starsystem with colonized worlds is shown. (The blue dots)  Clicking on one of the stars and clicking on the stylized starsystem takes you to the corresponding solar system. Here you see a simple, one-planet system I selected because it is practically next to us. One of our scouts will explore this system.  This is another system close by. With a lot of planets, so I'll send my other scout here. Hopefully we get some new colonies soon! In both cases, I send the planet I want to travel to into my clipboard. Together with the fleet order menu, I can use the clipboard-menu later to send ships to the targets I've chosen. Yes, this means I effectively need three different menus to move ships to other places on the starmap.  For comparisons' sake, this is the second system I'll explore. The blue dot just below it is our Lowtax-system.  By clicking on the greco-roman building we can take a look at where empires are on the map. Here we see the GOP has at least planets in two different systems.  The DarkSyde Empire has even three systems! They're a bit far away from each other, though.  In a strange coincidence, the Reddit Federation only has one system, like us.  The Hierarchy gave me a nasty shock, until I remembered to move the map around a bit and saw it's single system was actually on the other side of our small galaxy. Not actually right below us, like this angle suggests.  And now it's time to finally move my explorers, so I can finish this turn! First I open up the clipboard, which now shows the two planets I've selected from nearby systems.  Smoias is completely empty. If everything looks good, I'll probably send an Ark ship here later.  Stoius isn't that good a target, but if I find nothing here, I can try at the other planets in the same system without losing much time.  At this point I absentmindedly try to move the window around. The game of course crashes. Yes, I wasn't joking as I said the game crashes every time you try to move a window.  Luckily I'm playing on an emulator with save states, so I only lost a couple seconds to redo that last bit.  And with this, our two explorer-fleets are on their way!  Actually no, I forgot how using the clipboard works and went by memory when making the orders, so of course I had to redo one of them, thanks to planet Smoyas, not my intended target. gently caress off, Smoyas! You're probably some barren shithole, anyway! Now this fleet will travel to Smoias, the planet it was supposed to travel to in the first place. So, that was turn 1. Now it's time for Christmas 2020 and I'll see you next year!  gently caress.  gently caress!  I forgot to pay the ships I ordered! gently caress! Libluini fucked around with this message at 02:10 on Aug 30, 2015 |
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Aug 30, 2015 00:46
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On one hand, it looks like winning this game is like wading through 6 miles of sewage to get punched in the face. On the other hand, I look forward to the horrific, inevitable failure as our empire is utterly wiped from existence.
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Aug 30, 2015 03:34
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ashnjack posted:On one hand, it looks like winning this game is like wading through 6 miles of sewage to get punched in the face. On the other hand, I look forward to the horrific, inevitable failure as our empire is utterly wiped from existence. Oh boy, you can look forward to even more inevitable doom in my next post (up in a couple of hours, right now I'm too depressed to write about Imperium).
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Aug 30, 2015 11:50
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Year 2021: To Order a Mobilization So, our first turn was a mess. I forgot some important things, like making sure all our subordinates are actually getting payed. The evil DarkSyde Empire sent out an invasion fleet last turn, which now slowly creeps closer to us. Thanks to us just beginning the loving game, we’re totally blind and have no idea if YouTuber Phroogon just send his two scouts to mess with us or a fleet of 50+ warships. We simply have no way of knowing.  The very first thing Emperor ChiefGune does in January 2021 is to impose an embargo on DarkSyde. We call it DarkSydePhil to include the name of the DarkSyde Empire’s capital in the embargo. We’re embargoing Planetary Defenses, just in case our dumb planetary AI tries to sell it to them. If the war goes one for long enough and we aren’t getting steamrolled, I’ll embargo militia arms and other useful stuff, too.  As a citizen of the European Union, I’m a fan of sanctions. So after our embargo, I also set some really high import and export duties. Now our own corporations and DarkSyde’s corporations have to pay us a lot every time they trade with us. This probably does more to discourage trade than our flimsy embargo. On the other hand, an embargo does more than just discouraging trade, it completely stops it with the commodities you’re embargoing. Useful if you want to make dead sure something doesn’t get traded away.  Our historical wealth in 2020 and 2021, respectively. Our wealth shrank only slightly thanks to me forgetting to pay for our new warships last year. Whoops.  At least our production of tech goods is now at normal levels. We even build some robots! Too late for our ongoing construction, but our second run should be supplied by homegrown robots, instead of filthy alien ones.  Surprisingly, the empire sending a huge invasion fleet to us is the one we traded the most with last year. This of course means my dumb AI would have traded away weapons and defenses literally to the guys bombing us into rubble if I hadn’t put a stop to it now. This also means the robots currently used for constructing our three corvettes probably came from DarkSyde. The same empire currently invading us. Dumb AI decisions cut both ways!  Since I’m the eternal optimist, I try giving out Viagra this year for a +3% boost on every planet’s population growth. Now if we start colonizing more worlds we actually have the people to pull it off without crippling ourselves! And if we end up suffering under overpopulation, we go to shipping crates full of condoms around instead. This window is neat to have, just be aware the AI can and will just ignore your orders if it would result in a small colony stagnating. Hidden in the manual is also a short warning about people getting angry if you drop too many condoms into their mail slots. Negative population boosts can be dangerous. Overpopulation can also be dangerous, though. The solution? Send an Ark ship. It’s still 49 years to the next election, so ChiefGune doesn’t need to pump money into the campaign fund yet. His popularity rating has skyrocketed from last year’s 50% to now 63%. Hopefully the DarkSyde invasion won’t hurt his ratings too much.  2021 is the year I remember to build a spy antenna. But our super space antenna can’t be build, since with our current tech level even Earth, our best planet, can’t reach any nearby star systems. But what about looking for enemy fleets closing in on us? gently caress you, says Imperium. You don’t need early warning.  Cimbri and that other guy are still in deep space with their scouts, hurtling closer to their targets with every passing day. Hopefully they will still have a home when this war is over.  Our imperial treasury is still full of Imperial Zongs. Zongs I need to finally pay our shipyards so they start working. Emperor ChiefGune gets an unpleasant surprise in early February, when one of his servants brings him a carefully worded message from the imperial shipyards, asking for the funds they need to build the ships the Aurora Empire ordered last year. A couple executions later, the Emperor personally orders the imperial treasury to approve a transfer of the needed funds to the imperial shipyards. Just before February 2021 comes to a close, the shipyards finally start working on our three corvettes. Luckily the shipyards already bought and collected all commodities needed for the construction in 2020, so we at least won’t run into any more delays.  The DarkSyde Empire is still NEUTRAL to us. Which is coincidentally the only reliable info we can get right now, everything else is bollocks thanks to the 100% distortion. I guess invading your neighbors isn’t that bad if you’re a weirdo alien. As a human, I’m quite miffed myself. But the UI can’t track my moods, so the aliens can’t possibly know this. Maybe the aliens would be horrified if they knew how we think about being invaded?  Earth in 2021. Not much has changed. We got some more defenses thanks to our subsidy, but that’s it.  This reminds me, while imperial subsidies are still running for Earth and Saturn, I start setting up subsidies for the planets I forgot last year. Mars gets the maximum amount for tech development, and some additional Zongs for infrastructure and defense.  Venus gets the same treatment.  Jupiter is a bit different. I concentrate more on defenses and less on infrastructure, since the planet is too lovely to justify spending more than necessary on it. Defenses we just need because of the invasion, so that’s priority here.  I also spend some time replacing planetary leaders. The UI doesn’t want me to, though. Orpheus goes back into the pool during the ensuing mess. Welp, at least he gets payed now.  Cornelius becomes governor of Venus for exactly five seconds, then the interface fucks me over.  Publius ends up my ambassador to the DarkSyde Empire for some reason. I don’t know, I just remember a giant headache after trying to get the game to accept him as the leader of Jupiter several times.  After several crashes I can finally put one of my guys as governor to Jupiter.  The game really doesn’t want me to change anything, it seems.  After some more crashes, I give up. Quintus is another, quite able leader. And thanks to the game wearing me down, he gets to keep the job. And every subordinate receives payment now. Clicking through the slow-as-mollasses UI about three dozen times wasn't fun, but at least now we don't face a future rebellion by some chucklefuck we forgot to give a salary.  I’ve not forgotten the invasion! I raise a tank army on every planet we own, with some infantry added in for flavor.  For some reason Saturn already had some troops available, but this only makes the mobilization easier. After Pyroi’s ten infantry divisions, I raise another 40+ armored divisions to give him some tanks. The Emperor contemplates giving Pyroi a small medal or something for his fast reaction to the crisis, but decides it’s to early yet. He gets a small pay rise next turn, though.  Immediately after raising close to 1,5 million soldiers, the game crashes again. But the joke’s on you, Imperium: I already made a save state just moments earlier!   Earth now has 85 divisions protecting it, each 10k soldiers strong.  Mars has 29 divisions now. Hopefully we get some defenses next turn, when the imperial subsidy had some time to work.  Venus has only gotten 23 divisions out of the conscription this year, since the population on the planet is so low. Venus definitely needs some more troops.  Quintus has done some fine work and the moons of Jupiter are defended by 37 divisions, mostly tanks. (Like everywhere, really.)  Pyroi has done wonders on Saturn. Our imperial subsidy has started raising technology and defenses, while the general mobilization has created an army of 52 divisions. The population is rather too high for such a remote world, actually. It’s probably time to send some of them off to new worlds. And with this we’re done for this turn. Next time: Colonization Blues  What  the hell  Uh, I hope Publius is just repeating what the other ambassador said last year, or we’re in trouble. I really hope this isn’t a second invasion fleet. I really start to hate the DarkSyde Empire.  Status 2022: Our corvettes are almost finished! Libluini fucked around with this message at 17:36 on Aug 30, 2015 |
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Aug 30, 2015 15:23
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Governor's Log, Spacedate: Me Day I have been informed that the people of Saturn have grown too many to remain isolated to just this world, and that we have to start sending off people to new worlds. However, I have decided that the true best way to take care of this problem is much simpler than beginning a colonization program-- I'm going to invade Jupiter.
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Aug 30, 2015 17:05
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Somehow I totally forgot to ask this last time: If you have any suggestions for what I should be doing, out with it! I'm playing mostly blind and most of my brain power is already tied up in trying to understand this mess of a game. You guys on the other hand don't need to sit down with a calculator trying to grasp why this or that doesn't function as the manual claims it does. You have all the time in the world to actually plan ahead, since you aren't butting heads with the UI. Problem of the day: I sat down with a calculator to calculate our average tech level to find out what our average tech level is and then I found out we should be able to build ships up to 30k ton gross weight. But we still can't -our limit right now is 10k ton gross weight, which is far too low according to the listed average tech levels in the manual. The manual posted:1-10k tons - ATL 5 Our own average tech level is slightly above 20 right now, so we should be able to build 30k ton starships. The game still works as if we're at level 5, though. You see the problem?
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Aug 31, 2015 14:17
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Year 2022: Colonization Blues Last turn we saw our enemy, the DarkSyde Empire, starting to colonize worlds. Together with the one (or two) invasion fleets bearing down on us, there’s a slight cause for panic!  First we need more information about what’s happening. To the star map! Luckily the DSE is still just the three systems from the very beginning. My awesome logic calculates this is because there were empty planets in one or more of those systems.  Blip Throider, subordinate of YouTuber Phroogon, is leading the new colony on Allerlux. The Phil-system has the worst star type, the worst planet-type and the best possible atmosphere. Not really prime real estate. The numbers are all wrong, again.  Staus on the other hand is a future problem of rank 1: Only the star type is dragging this planet down, the rest is good. Which means this colony will be a major production center for the DarkSyde Empire. Not good for us! On the other hand, the two new colonies are all inside the Phil-system of DarkSyde, which means this alien empire at least hasn’t spread beyond it’s borders. For now.  The Phil-system, DarkSyde’s capital, is closest to us from the three systems this empire has. (We’re the orange ball on the right of the triangle of stars directly below the grey cursor.) This gives us an explanation about why the invasion happened: We’re closest to their capital system and therefore closest to whatever fleet they had lying around. I’m guessing DarkSyde invaded us because I send out all my scouts on turn 1, so the AI decided I must be helpless because I didn’t have ships anymore.  This is Trosys, DarkSyde’s second system. It’s right on the edge of the map.  And Alloisys is equally remote and DarkSyde’s third system.  The Phil-system is practically a copy of the Lowtax-system, just with weirder names.  Smoyas, the planet I almost send my scout to after butterfingering “Smoias”, is actually one of the core planets of the DarkSyde Empire. At least this crisis is averted. Welp, at least we could have had a chance at some reliable information for the one turn before the planetary defenses blast our scout apart. Thankfully the scout is actually travelling to the right planet, so we can get some information without losing our scout. Ships are expensive in this game.  While I’m using the map, I take the opportunity to make a small-scale survey of our close-by alien planets. Most of them are duds, though. Luatax here for example has a mediocre planet-type, a poo poo-tier atmosphere and the second-to best star type. “Mediocre” wasn’t what I was looking for, so I kept searching.  OK, this planet is poo poo. Bad type, worst atmosphere and worst star type. If we ever colonize this piece of poo poo, we can expect a production capacity so low it’ll take three other planets to keep this colony afloat. I’m guessing, of course. I’ve no idea how bad an idea colonizing Lioyter would be, since the manual just gave me a table and essentially said: “Use this and good luck!”  Smatas is slightly better, thanks to the good atmosphere-type, but planet and star type are dragging this one down.  Allalux (not to be confused with Allerlux, the planet DarkSyde colonized) is slightly shittier than Smatas. No thanks! And with this I end my galactic survey of available space real estate. The only viable planets I’ve found is Luatax (mediocre) and Smoias (good, see our first year). Luckily one of our scouts is bearing down on Smoias, so we hopefully can send an Ark ship soon. Also surprise: You can only send Ark ships to planets you’ve claimed somehow. Hopefully a visiting scout is enough. The manual doesn’t explain any of this, so we’re essentially running this by blindly guessing.  2022 is the year we finally see that huge dip in wealth we should have gotten last year, thanks to me finally paying our shipyards.  If I read this right, prices of commodities are rising. Good, bad? Probably good if we export more, bad if we import more.  Most of this is unchanged, but we’re at 50 robots now, almost as much as space ship equipment. I think we can dial down the tech production somewhat. We don’t want to create a shortage somewhere else, after all.  The subsidies for Earth and Saturn ran out, so I made some new ones. Infrastructure and PD looked good the last time I saw it, but tech levels need to go up.  For some reason we imported even more stuff from our enemies and exported a lot. As an explanation: When our planets import something, they pay import taxes to our own treasury and that’s it. If our planets export something to aliens, those aliens have to pay our treasury. Negative taxes are reversed to stimulate trade. (So negative import taxes mean our treasury gives the planets importing goods extra money and negative export taxes mean we pay aliens for the privilege of trading with us.) Our import taxes with DarkSyde are high at the moment, so our planets should be discouraged from buying from over there, since they’re paying the imperial treasury a hefty sum every time they have to import. Our planets don’t seem to care. We also exported some goods to the DarkSyde even though I set a 20+% customs rate. The DarkSyde Empire must have been really needing that poo poo. Well, more money for us! The GOP got the majority of our exports, which again means money, thanks to the small 5% export tax I set to everyone not our enemy. Overall, our imports and exports are almost balanced, so our economy is still healthy. No need to make huge changes right now.  Emperor ChiefGune’s popularity is still rising. Impressive, an ongoing invasion and a media scandal, but his popularity is going up regardless. What scandal you ask? Well, this scandal: Imperial News posted:23rd August 2022 is a bad day for Emperor ChiefGune. The Secret Police has leaked information regarding one of the Emperor’s closest friends, Pyroi “the Great”, governor of Saturn. See? Everything is just fine. Next time: We make some political decisions.
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Sep 1, 2015 11:04
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Governor's Log, Spacedate: 32 Smarch Well, gently caress. It seems that recording all my innermost thoughts and posting them on Spacebook isn't the best idea. The Governor's Mansion has been locked down, and now I'm stuck inside. Even worse, it seems that my plan to conquer Jupiter is getting an executive veto from the Emperor himself. I can only assume he doesn't approve of consolidating power within Lowtax. Thankfully, Plan B is already in action, I sent a basket of snacks to the Imperial Palace with a note suggesting to retaliate against the DarkSyde Empire by wiping out their invasion fleet and then invading THEIR system instead. Man, am I good, or am I good? In other news, my bill to get Saturn renamed to "Super Best Planet X" is being held up in the Imperial Senate. It's not like those guys actually DO anything, the Emperor is where all the power is. It's like he micromanages the entire empire!
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Sep 1, 2015 20:37
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I'll try and give good suggestions when I think of any. If I feel like it, if you pay me enough.  In all seriousness though I don't really quite understand this...game...well enough yet to figure out what would or wouldn't be horrible to do. PS: Formally requesting some sort of recreational game room on the flagships of exploratory fleets, deep space is loving boring.
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Sep 2, 2015 04:43
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Cimbri posted:I'll try and give good suggestions when I think of any. If I feel like it, if you pay me enough. I'm confused myself. Right now it looks the decision to start playing was the most horrible thing to do. Playing Imperium blind with only the manual and it's sometimes misleading information as a help doesn't make things easier. The only "helpful" thing I found out is the strange fact someone made a VLP of Imperium. It's quite fascinating, in a dead silence sort of way. By the way, next post will be up in a couple hours.
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Sep 3, 2015 09:48
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Year 2023: Politics get Personal  The year starts off pretty drat well: Our three combat corvettes are finished. Finally.  This of course means Hyperman1992 gets some ships to command. All three new ships are transferred to Home Fleet. Now we’ve at least stopped being more helpless than a kitten in a tree.  Home Fleet is ready! By the way, our three corvettes have the combined strength of 12 scouts. Not bad, eh?  As an experiment, I made a simple, 2k ton scout with even more engines than the scout. The Lightning-class courier is slightly faster than the scout and has roughly 1/10th the combat power. It’s also almost twice as expensive. gently caress. I build exactly one ship to see how much good a faster ship is worth, then I’ll go back to the drawing board. Expensive scouts are kind of the opposite we need. Interestingly, while smaller ships need less commodities to build, the fixed costs are calculated by weight class. So a 2k ton ship is essentially the same as a 10k ton ship, just worse in every way except speed. This is because weapon and armor weight in units directly translate into points, while speed is calculated by a formula using gross weight of the ship, weight of the engines and the percentage of engines weight compared to ship weight. Also interesting: The AI-designs cheat. The scout we got at game start can’t actually be replicated in the ship class designer. If we try, we would end up with a ship class functionally identical to our scout, but about 50% more expensive.  This time I’m allocating the money right away, so no delays in building our new courier.  Political decision time! I send Decimus to be our ambassador with the Reddit Federation. Since he is charming and very competent, this should work out well. Since he is also disloyal scum, having him far away from anything important is a nice bonus as well.  I also stop loving up with appointing planetary leaders and remove Cato from Jupiter. Cato wasn’t bad, but he also wasn’t loyal. Marcus is reliable, not an idiot and far too dull to attract any followers should he stop being loyal in the future. A perfect subordinate!  Since Cato is untrustworthy, I make him the leader of our third scout fleet. Now he can wait in his space office for the new ship to be build. Then I can send him off somewhere to seek new planets for us.  This guy got promoted to planetary leader automatically after I shuffled another disloyal Muppet around. He isn’t another potential source of bad news, so he can have the job for now.  After all that shuffling around of goons, I stumble upon this little gem: Loyal, competent and a charming personality. Perfect for a good fleet commander! So he gets command of the Aurora Empire’s 1st Fleet. 1st Fleet will be our spearhead when we're finally in a position to visit the Phil-system to end the DarkSyde Empire for good.  And that’s it already for 2023. Our first two recon fleets are still moving through interstellar space to their targets, our new scout is being build and I practically used up all the money the game gave me back in 2020. We barely made any new money since then and I need everything we earn right now for subsidies and a spy antenna (as soon as our technology level is high enough to actually build one, that is). The rest is waiting for invaders to arrive, our scouts to arrive and waiting for our tech level to rise high enough so we can build heavier ships. A lot of waiting. Remember: Every year we don’t find Nostrum, our Emperor and all his goons are on death row. Some of our guys are 40 already and can’t take many more turns before I have to start taking their age into account. After all, I don’t know and the manual doesn’t mention when “old age” actually happens. 80? 100? 60? We don’t know. Let’s just hope we find some Nostrum before ChiefGune and all the others start dropping like flies. Next time: My posting-buffer is empty, so no idea. It will be a surprise for all of us Libluini fucked around with this message at 12:58 on Sep 3, 2015 |
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Sep 3, 2015 12:55
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This really gives me an Aurora vibe. Graphically sparse, but, by the looks of it, trying to simulate a hell of a lot of detail anyway.
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Sep 3, 2015 20:52
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PurpleXVI posted:This really gives me an Aurora vibe. Graphically sparse, but, by the looks of it, trying to simulate a hell of a lot of detail anyway. Well, the programmers really tried to make a good game, but it really shows they worked on the ZX80 before they made this "gem". The ZX80 is to the Amiga and the Atari ST as a brick is to a calculator. Of course this doesn't explain gently caress-ups like making the game crash if you try to move a window. Or the crash you get if you try to move more than one of your goons around. (You have to close the entire menu after every change to work around this.) Or why the game crashes if you didn't listen to the horrible report-music until it finishes. I've no idea what those clowns did to the source code to make very simple things go so very, very wrong. Since they were students at the time, it probably involves drugs.
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Sep 4, 2015 00:42
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Short update: I've build up a small buffer of screenshots again. The first new post will drop tomorrow. Other things I found out while playing today: - I tested ahead to see if the ship designer was broken. Nope. Technological advance is just a lot more slower than the manual claims. The average tech levels for ship classes are apparently just a load of baloney. We needed nearly ten levels more for our first upgrade than the table in the manual shows. - A test with the automatic helpers turned out the crazy poo poo the manual was talking about stimulating trade with negative taxes is also poo poo. - Our ambassadors are all assholes. - The ambassadors of other empires are also assholes. - After some trying, I've found out how to colonize planets. More about that tomorrow. I'm unbelievably angry right now. Tomorrow: A Lesson in Crippling Trade with Excessive Taxation Also Tomorrow: Negative Taxation doesn't Pay Either Libluini fucked around with this message at 14:47 on Sep 5, 2015 |
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Sep 5, 2015 14:37
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Libluini posted:Short update: Good lord, are you sure this game isn't some sort of elaborate joke?
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Sep 5, 2015 18:07
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i love this thread because this computer program seems to have most of the components that would come together to make a game but they forgot to apply any concepts of game design to the melange
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Sep 5, 2015 19:06
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